Gisia mohammadi-wiki
' 'Wikis' '' ' Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, one that really is attempting to store the "sum of human knowledge." By the time you read this, the English version of Wikipedia will house over 3 million separate entries with information about everything from the Aaadonta (a type of slug) to Zzzax (a fictional super via lain from Marvel Comies). Wikipedia is one of the most important sites for educators to understand. It represents the potential of collaboration on the Web. The word wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian wiki- wiki, which means "quick." Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995, who was looking to design an easy authoring tool that might spur people to publish. And the key word here is "easy," because, plainly put, a wiki is a Web site where anyone can edit anything any time they want. In that way, Wikipedia is the poster child for the collaborative construction of knowledge and truth that the new, interactive Web facilitates. Every day, thousands of people who have no connection to one another engage in the purposeful work of negotiating and creating trut.. They do this with no expectation that their contributions will be in some way acknowledged or compensated, and they do it with the understanding that what they contribute can be freely edited or modified or reused by anyone else for any purpose. The extent to which this happens and to which it is suc cessful is truly inspiring. we need to teach Wikipedia to our students. Why? Well, first, because they are already using it in their research, whether we like it or not. Wikipedia entries consistently come up in the top ten search results for just about anything we're looking for, and our students use it a great deal. Second, because Wikipedia is becoming a trusted and cited source by many major news outlets (the New York Times among them) and scholars. And finally, there is much to learn in the process of using Wikipedia that can help our student become better learner –namely, collaboration and negotiation skills. The success of Wikipedia has spawned a wiki revolution. Not only can you contribute to the sum of all human knowledge, you can add your favorite recipes to the Recipes Wiki (tinyurl.coml64q8em), your best vacation bargains to Wikitravel.org, even your favorite spots for Buffalo wings to, you guessed it, the Bufalo wings wiki (tinyurl.coml5ss9wu). There's also Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikispecies, and Wikiquotes. Corporations like Disney, McDonalds, Sony, and BMW have started using wikis to manage documents and information. MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities are testing the waters with their faculty and students. The city of Rochester, New York, is using a wiki to let people share. Philosophically, wikis can play havoc with the traditional ideas of copyright and intellectual property. Obviously, they follow closely the open source software ideal that the quality of the collectively produced product is more important than owning the idea or the code. Really,wikis bring the concept of open source to the mainstream, as the ideas and process are no longer reserved just for software developers. All of these challenges are great entry points for a discussion about the use of wikis in the classroom. As we continue to move toward a world where everyone has access to ideas and where collaboration is the expectation rather than the exception, wikis can go a long way toward teaching our students some very useful skills for their future. ' ' 'THE CHALLENGE OF WIKIPEDIA IN SCHOOL ' For one, teachers should spend some time checking Wikipedia's accuracy on their own. If your experience is anything like mine has been, you may end up agreeing with Jobs. But this stiJI takes a faith that we didn't need in the days before the interactive Web, a faith that collectively we can produce information that is as high quality as what a trusted few produced in the past. It's a tough call. The early consensus among educators seems to be to tell. students to use Wikipedia as a starting point for their work, but not as a sole resource. The additional challenge with Wikipedia is that each of its entries is in fact a collaboratively written research report. It's not exposition in the senses that the entries are defending a thesis-just the opposite, in fact. Wikipedia's whole intention is to foster a neutral point of view in every entry. But say you assign students to do reports on a specific country. So in this case, is it more important for a student to be able to find that information and know how to evaluate it, or to know how to repeat work that's already been done? A final challenge is changing the way we think about the content our own students create. 'WIKIS IN SCHOOLS ' In fact, wiki projects in schools have worked best when the teacher loosens the reins a bit and lets students manage the content on the site. Wikis pose some pedagogical challenges as well. They can be so effective at fostering collaboration that the teacher really needs to carefully examine her role in their use. As I noted previously, early implementations of wikis in educational settings have shown that the more autonomy teachers give to students in terms of negotiating the scope and quality of the content they are creating, the better. It's a very democratic process of knowledge creation. In using wikis, students are not only learning how to publish content; they are also learning how to develop and use all sorts of collaborative skills, negotiating with others to agree on correctness, meaning, relevance, and more. In essence, students begin to teach each other. Teachers who impose a lot of right and wrong on that process can undermine the effectiveness of the tool. So how might we use wikis in our classrooms? One of the most obvious ways is to create an online text for your curriculum that you and your students can both contribute to. A co-construction of this type could make for a much more personalized text one specific to your particular class. Or, consider adding other teachers who teach the same class. It could easily become a resource, a showcase for best practices, and an articulation tool as well. Students might use it to create their own class Wikipedia. 'EXAMPLES OF WIKIS IN K-1 2 EDUCATION ' Among the teachers using wikis in schools, few have done more than Vicki Davis at Westwood High in Camilla, Georgia. Her computer classes use the Westwood.Wikispaces.com site to complete many of their projects and a portal for assignments and relevant links to many other sources. But even more, Vicki has started to use wikis to connect her students to other learners from 2007 around the world, and her "Flat Classroom" project wiki ( fatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com) and her Horizon Project from 2008 (tinyurl.coml2knznm) are great examples.